By Kuol Malou
Australia is becoming more culturally diverse, but diversity and belonging are not the same thing.
At June 2025, 8.8 million people living in Australia were born overseas, representing 32 per cent of the population. That is close to the highest proportion recorded in more than a century. Australia is not becoming multicultural in some distant future. It already is.
The more difficult question is what happens after people arrive, establish families, build careers and become part of the country.
Do they feel that they belong? Do other Australians understand their lives beyond broad categories such as migrant, refugee, African or multicultural? And whose experiences become part of the stories Australia tells about itself?
Those questions matter for African Australians because being present in a country is not necessarily the same as being understood within it.
The 2025 Mapping Social Cohesion research found that support for multiculturalism in Australia remains strong. At the same time, the sense of belonging is uneven. Younger people and Australians from non-English-speaking backgrounds were among those reporting the lowest levels of belonging, while prejudice and discrimination towards some migrant and faith communities remain persistent.
The same research points to something important about how belonging develops. People who feel connected to their neighbourhoods and participate in community life are more likely to report a strong sense of belonging and trust in others.
Media is not responsible for creating belonging on its own. Housing, employment, discrimination, financial security, relationships, institutions and neighbourhoods matter enormously.
But media is one of the places where we learn who belongs in the public story.
It shapes which people become familiar to us, which experiences are considered worthy of attention and whose expertise is recognised when Australia talks about itself.
For African Australians, that leaves an important question: which parts of our lives are actually being recorded?
African Australians are part of Australian workplaces, businesses, universities, schools, hospitals, public institutions, creative industries and community organisations. Families are being raised here. Businesses are being built here. Careers are beginning and ending here. Young people are negotiating identities shaped by Australia and by family histories that began elsewhere.
Most of this life is not dramatic.
That is precisely why it matters.
Public conversations about African Australians can become concentrated around a relatively narrow range of subjects: migration, racism, crime, disadvantage, conflict, cultural celebration and, occasionally, exceptional achievement.
Many of those stories are legitimate and necessary. Racism should be reported. Crime should not be ignored because the people involved come from a minority community. Migration experiences matter. Success deserves recognition.
The problem begins when these become the main lenses through which a much more complicated group of people is understood.
Between crisis and celebration sits most of life.
There is the professional trying to establish a career while navigating assumptions that colleagues may never have to think about. There is the small-business owner discovering that being respected within a community does not automatically translate into customers beyond it. There are parents trying to preserve parts of their culture while raising children whose understanding of identity has been shaped largely in Australia.
There are also young Australians whose identities do not fit neatly inside the categories others give them. They can be deeply Australian and deeply connected to an African heritage without experiencing those identities as opposites.
These are not necessarily headline stories. But together they reveal something important about the country Australia is becoming.
Who decides what becomes a story?
The question of representation is often reduced to whether diverse people appear in the media.
There is a deeper question: who participates in deciding what deserves to be covered?
Media Diversity Australia’s Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories? research was created to examine who tells, frames and produces Australian television news and current affairs. Its work has documented the continuing challenge of achieving meaningful cultural diversity not only among the people appearing on screen, but among those involved in producing Australian journalism.
That distinction is important.
Being interviewed is not the same as participating in the production of a story. Being asked to respond to an issue is different from being in a position to recognise the issue before anybody else considers it newsworthy.
This does not mean African Australians should report only on African Australians, or that journalists should be restricted to communities that share their identity. Good journalism depends on curiosity about people whose lives are different from our own.
But having people with different backgrounds inside media organisations can broaden the range of questions being asked, the sources journalists know to contact and the experiences they recognise as significant.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Race Reporting Handbook, developed with Media Diversity Australia, makes a related argument. It encourages newsrooms to build stronger relationships with communities, improve diversity and avoid forms of reporting that reproduce stereotypes or flatten complicated experiences.
Australia’s own Multicultural Framework Review has also placed media within the broader question of identity and belonging. The government’s response identifies participation in media, arts, culture and sport as part of creating a more welcoming Australia, while the review itself calls for an independent and diverse media sector.
That does not mean a more diverse newsroom will solve prejudice or social division. It does suggest that media is part of the infrastructure through which Australians encounter one another.
And that makes the quality and breadth of the stories important.
Telling our own stories also comes with responsibility
There is another side to this conversation that community media cannot avoid.
Having the ability to tell our own stories does not mean we should tell only flattering ones.
African Australian communities are not a single community with one experience or one position. They include different nationalities, ethnicities, religions, generations, political views, migration histories and economic circumstances.
There are successful organisations and poorly governed ones. There are leaders doing remarkable work and leaders whose decisions deserve scrutiny. There are businesses growing and businesses failing. There are families thriving and families experiencing serious difficulty.
There are conversations about mental health, employment, gender, family violence, generational conflict, identity, leadership and responsibility that can be uncomfortable but still deserve careful reporting.
Community media loses credibility if its only purpose becomes correcting negative perceptions by producing positive ones.
That simply replaces one incomplete story with another.
The responsibility is to tell fuller stories.
That means celebrating achievement without turning journalism into promotion. It means reporting difficult issues without exploiting communities for attention. It means allowing disagreement without treating every disagreement as division.
It also means recognising that African Australians should not have to appear as either victims or exceptional success stories to be considered worth writing about.
Most people are neither.
They are simply living.
And ordinary life is where much of belonging is negotiated.
The stories we still need
Perhaps the future of African Australian media depends less on finding one perfect story about the community and more on making room for many imperfect ones.
We need to hear from established leaders, but also from people who have never been invited onto a panel.
We need the entrepreneur explaining what happened when a business idea failed, not only the founder photographed after it succeeded.
We need professionals discussing the realities of Australian workplaces, young people writing about identity without being required to speak for an entire generation, and parents describing how family expectations change when children grow up in a different country.
We need researchers, artists, tradespeople, community workers, teachers, students and people living outside the major cities.
Some stories will be uncomfortable. Some will be funny. Some will challenge assumptions held outside African communities, and others will challenge assumptions held within them.
That is healthy.
The aim should not be to establish a single African Australian narrative. No single narrative could honestly represent communities this varied.
The aim should be to create enough room that no individual story is expected to explain everybody.
So perhaps the question is no longer simply whether African Australians are represented.
The better questions are these: Who gets heard? Who is still mostly spoken about? Which experiences repeatedly become news, and which disappear because nobody recognised them as stories? Whose knowledge is sought when Australia debates the issues affecting their lives?
Australia’s multicultural future will not be decided only through government policy or public institutions. It is being built every day in workplaces, homes, schools, businesses, neighbourhoods and relationships between people whose histories may be very different.
Media can help us see some of that life more clearly.
For African Australians, that means continuing to ask mainstream institutions for thoughtful and accurate coverage. But it also means developing more people who can write, interview, photograph, investigate, film and document what is happening around them.
Not because every African Australian life contains an extraordinary story.
Because African Australian lives, in all their ordinary complexity, are already part of the Australian story.
